MWC 2013: AMD demoes Temash platform, destined to replace E-series

AMD had a booth at MWC 2013 this year and held a number of demos for its next generation dual and quad-core mobile processors, Temash, as well as its next generation Richland APU models.

All the working prototypes on AMD’s booth were reference designs from the top ODM makers (Quanta, Wistron etc) and although they are in working order, chances are that shipped products will be radically different.

Temash will compete with Intel Atom’s leading system-on-chip, Z2760, which is present in a number of shipping tablets (Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 2, HP Envy X2, Acer Iconia Tab W510, Asus VivoTab Smart etc) and is based on the Clovertrail platform.

AMD employees have told us that we can expect Temash-based systems to last up to 10 hours when surfing online and six hours when watching HD videos. Arguably, this depends on a number of other factors including battery capacity.

They are likely to ship in the second half of 2013 and will cost under $599 (around £350) and are likely to be sold as tablets, hybrids and ultrabook-like systems.

AMD ran the reference Temash systems against Atom-powered tablets on games and on Microsoft’s HTML5 Graphics benchmark, the fishbowl demo. On the latter, the differences were glaring especially when the number of fishes swimming in the bowl were high.

Interestingly, AMD will be shipping its Temash products with a number of software applications that are freebies/value added proposals, and fall under AMD’s new Elite Experiences. These make the most of AMD’s platform and provide useful features for the end user for free.

These include AMD Screen Mirror, which is not dissimilar to Miracast or Intel’s Wi-Di, AMD Face Login, AMD Gesture Controls.